The Dark Lady's Wardrobe

There's been not much doing round here, on account of it being high marking season. Thrills all round, really. Take this scenario, fur egg sample:

1. Student writes on Mr W. Shakespeare's Sonnet, the Number Twenty, reproduced below for your all-round edification.

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,

Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created;

Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

2. Student explains that Shakespeare considers men morally superior to women because Renaissance men are "not acquainted with shifting change".

3. Student explains that Renaissance women were notorious for shifting change because menstruation and the insufficiency of Elizabethan undergarments necessitated regular changes of clothes, whereas Renaissance men could sport the same pair of pantaloons for months on end.

4. Smitten with this elegantly historicised account of how Early Modern tamponlessness shaped Shakespeare's sexual preferences, your trusty servant retires to her chamber, where she tells her rosary for five hours before she can resume her examinatorial pen with renewed faith in the something something something.

Meanwhile, the ENORMOUS cats (3.8 kg between them, as of their last vetting) had their inaugural experience of the heater last night.

Pleasure with a capital P.